08 · Finding Life in the Shadow of Death
"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. In the span of a heartbeat." — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
This morning, holding my coffee, I sat in front of the screen and hit Enter, ready to run a newly written piece of underlying operating system code. No errors reported, no exceptions thrown; the entire system just instantly crashed at the physical level. All processes, memory stacks—forcibly cleared within a tenth of a second.
Staring at the black screen, I suddenly felt a slight dizziness. This completely unannounced sense of rupture closely mirrors the experience of facing death. We always assume life will loop infinitely along a predetermined trajectory, like a stably running program. But the interrupt of death never follows any preset logic.
Last year, my primary school enlightenment teacher suddenly passed away from cancer. She was only in her thirties, one of the most profoundly influential people in my life. Upon hearing the news, I didn't burst into tears immediately; I didn't even feel sad. It felt like fake news. Grief is not a linearly onset emotion; it has no sense of distance. It's exactly like the depth charges Joan Didion described, and I was a submarine sunk at the bottom of the sea, feeling the episodic shockwaves over countless days and nights that followed. That physical throbbing pain is real: spreading from the heart to the whole body, hands and feet turning ice-cold, nerves stretched taut. You suddenly feel that the daily life right in front of you—going to class on time, eating on time, imagining a grand future—has become incomparably absurd. A vibrant life, like flowers and leaves suddenly falling, turns to dust, leaving nothing behind but memories for others.
Not long ago, my grandfather suffered a sudden heart attack. The whole family waited outside the ICU, unable to do anything but pray in a state of near-collapse tension. Fortunately, he was successfully resuscitated in the end. When I went to visit him, watching the numbers jumping on the ventilator and holding his swollen, weak hand, my tears instantly broke their banks. When a person of sound mind truly, personally touches this icy coldness of a fading life, even if only once, it becomes impossible to ever again believe without reservation that "tomorrow will definitely come."
Painkillers and Staring into the Void
During that suffocating time outside the ICU doors, I suddenly understood why humanity needs religion.
Faced with the immense fear and sense of loss brought by death, we need ultimate comfort. Religion compassionately hands over a painkiller: Christianity tells us death is not the end, but the porch leading to heaven; Buddhism promises the immortality of the soul, the six realms of reincarnation, and that the ones we deeply loved but lost will reunite with us in another beautiful world.
This soothing is warm; it supports countless broken souls through the dark night. However, if you cannot completely surrender yourself to this transcendental faith, if you stubbornly want to use reason to seek the truth, then you can only step into the wilderness of philosophy to stare directly at the most terrifying word of all: nothingness.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus once tried to comfort us with logic: "Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist." But this seemingly self-consistent logic completely fails to soothe humanity's true fear. What we fear is precisely the fact that "we do not exist." Accustomed to existing, we simply cannot accept the disappearance of the self. The only instinct of life's existence is to continue, and death is a forced wipe. It resets all the glory, shame, love, hate, and obsessions of our entire lives to zero.
The philosopher Emil Cioran saw it more clearly: "Life is nothing but another name for this terror." The love of life and the fear of death are essentially two sides of the same coin. The reason we spend every moment avoiding death is precisely because we have an extreme greed for life. Without the fear of the final end, life would lose its tension.
Being-toward-death
In the face of death, all worldly experience becomes invalid. If you continuously strip away a person's life layer by layer, the end point is definitively death. Almost everything we do every day—eating, sleeping, defending against danger, even reproducing—is essentially avoiding death.
However, this instinctual avoidance is ultimately futile. When we truly experience death and turn around to look directly at that absolute end, a clarity born of despair emerges: we are destined to possess only this extremely limited life that is doomed to decay, and the meaning of all existence before our eyes must be bestowed by ourselves. This is exactly what Heidegger called "Being-toward-death". When you are constantly deeply stung by the inevitability of death, you will violently pull yourself out of the sinking and numbness of the everyday.
Having personally experienced the departure of my teacher and the resuscitation of my grandfather, I suddenly realized that the gains and losses that used to cause me extreme internal friction, the boring games in interpersonal relationships, the self-suppression to cater to the outside world... in the face of the absolute nature of death, are all meaningless fragments of life. The fear of death is like a sharp scalpel. "Only after personally experiencing death does one want to love, to suffer, and to be born again."
Because I am certain that my consciousness will one day completely dissipate, I am all the more driven to get up in the faint light of dawn to feel the clear, biting air; it is precisely because the physical body will inevitably decay that I yearn to understand this vast world and build deep spiritual connections with others; it is precisely because all relationships in the world will ultimately face parting that I must love generously and hurt bravely while I have them, refusing to just fall silent. In the ruins of death, we can also continuously attain rebirth.
Living is the Most Beautiful Counterattack
Not all civilizations view death as an absolute tragedy. In Mexico's Day of the Dead, death is another journey in the cycle of life; people use marigolds, music, and food to cross the boundary between Yin and Yang and have a carnival with the departed. This cultural custom reminds us: we may not be able to defeat death logically, but we can reach a reconciliation with it emotionally.
True Being-toward-death is not immersing oneself in grief and philosophical meditation every day, but shifting one's gaze away from that inevitable endpoint and firmly landing it back on the life right in front of us.
No matter how grand a philosophical proposition life and death is, what we can do right now is to live each specific, minute day well. Eat on time, stay healthy, cherish all the lovely things we possess, and live exuberantly and joyfully in the shadow of death. This is our most beautiful strike against death.
See you around.
— Maggie
Beijing · 12 March 2026